*
Hesperus awoke in his cabin, surfacing muzzily from a distressing dream where a huge, black, metallic lobster with blonde hair and smiling eyes clutched at his throat with armoured claws. His head pounded, and he felt sick and breathless. Rus loomed over him, chest labouring. “I’ve got the electrolysis set up,” he said. “Probably best to get everyone down to the engine room. That’s where the oxygen is.”
Hesperus sat up, groaning and gasping. With some effort, he focused on the ship’s chronometer, counting down towards their re-emergence into normal space. They were still more than thirty-two hours from Issoar – and then of course there was the journey through Issoar space to the Co-operative station orbiting the planet, and making an appeal for assistance, for clemency, for life … “Right … yes, right: the engine room. Good.” At least Rus had succeeded with the electrolysis plant: his own attempts to persuade the two atmospheric reprocessors to allow the air to flow again had been singularly unsuccessful. A rotting, vegetal reek permeated the ship; he suspected that some portions of the ship’s air-plant had begun to ferment. That at least might explain why the crustacean mutineers had sung incoherently throughout his appeals, and had failed to respond to even the wildest of his entreaties.
The atmosphere in the engine room could hardly be described as “fresh”, but it was noticeably easier to breathe, even with all the crew huddled around Rus’s water-electrolysis rig. Two fat cables snaked from the ship’s fusion generator, terminating in a large transparent plastic vat full of water. Bubbles seethed around two corrugated electrode plates: hydrogen gas being released at one, and sweet oxygen at the other. The gases were collected by two separate funnel systems, with the hydrogen piped into a header tank bolted to the generator, and the oxygen allowed to waft out into the engine room.
Hesperus felt the fog in his head begin to clear. “Excellent … excellent,” he said, inhaling deeply. “Once again, we of the Dubious Profit shall prove our mettle!” He glanced around: Stepan was picking his nose, staring blearily at the strings of bubbles rising within the electrolysis rig; Gasazck, meanwhile, had fallen asleep, folded up into a tangle of bony joints and straggly green feathers and resembling nothing so much as a discarded umbrella. A faint series of unmusical sounds floated from the ventilation ducts.
“Uh-huh,” said Rus. “There’s something you need to see, Hesperus. Come over here.” The engineer ducked under the slowly turning main drive shaft which transected the room. He pointed up to where the shaft entered the main engine assembly. A circular tube of blue liquid was fixed to the bulkhead, marked off with a series of gradations. A single red bead floated within the tube, bobbing around the two o’clock position.
“Ah … uh … hmm,” said Hesperus, glancing at Rus. “Hmmmm.”
Rus rolled his eyes, and clenched and unclenched his fists. “It’s a witchspace potentiometer,” he said.
“Aha, yes! Ah … remind me …?”
“Love and death, give me strength!” said Rus. “It indicates the probability curvature of our projection towards our destination. No, that’s not doing it either, is it?” he added, as Hesperus frowned and rubbed his chin. “How about: little-red-dot-show-how-we-fly-to-star?”
Hesperus tutted. “There is no need to be facetious,” he said. “I am a pilot and a captain: I command, I direct, I steer. I am content to leave the mechanical details in your capable hands. Can you tell me, please, in straightforward terms: what does this red bead mean?”
“It means,” said Rus, “that the mass quotient of our witchjump has increased: another ship, or ships, entered our wormhole back in the Lerela system before it closed. Someone is following us.”
Hesperus looked up sharply. “Following us? Are you certain? Perhaps the bead is stuck …” he reached up and tapped at the tube.
Rus slapped his hand away. “Yes! Yes, I’m certain.”
“Hmm,” said Hesperus. “It’s possible, I suppose, that one or even both of those Mambas could have flown into our wormhole … they’ll emerge from witchspace shortly after we do. It’s worth knowing, of course, but I don’t think we need to worry unduly. Mambas are not jump-capable ships, remember. They’ll find themselves trapped in Issoar, dependent on the good graces of the Issorvans to get themselves back home again. Likely they’ll behave themselves. We probably won’t have any trouble from them.”
“Two Mambas, eh?” said Rus. “All that fuss … anyway, no. Not two Mambas. That’s a sixty-odd degree deviation you’re looking at, there, on a six-point-eight light-year jump: that’s about … oh, seventy Mambas, maybe eighty? I can’t remember their exact displacement. But anyway, no. It’s a lot of something, though. Or maybe one very large something, because I can’t see how our wormhole could have stayed open long enough to let that many ships use it. It would have to be very large … you didn’t, I don’t know, rip off a chunk of that forsaken rock and drag it through behind you?”
Hesperus remembered two things: first, the vast bulk of the Fractal Sacrifice, as it sat in its private dock at Stranglehold’s further end; and second, the chiming of the attack alarm that had sounded moments before the Dubious Profit had jumped out, which had signalled the appearance of a new, and hostile, ship. His legs suddenly felt very weak, and he sat down with a thump on the oily deck.
“Uh-huh,” said Rus, folding his arms and looking down at him. “I didn’t think we’d scraped the bottom of this little catastrophe just yet.”
“We, ah … we may have a problem, indeed.” Hesperus described the Fractal Sacrifice to Rus, who paled, just a fraction. “And we’ll be dropping out of witchspace with next to nothing in our tanks: I don’t think we can hope to outrun her.” The Dubious Profit had burned almost all her fuel to tear open the wormhole to Issoar; any ship which followed her through, however, would have made the journey without expending a single drop.
“I hate to break this to you, Hesperus, but I don’t think we can hope to outfight a ship like that, either. The front shield is gone, the rear shield all but: we’d need a good long time in normal space just to let the laser cool down again, never mind recharging our defences.”
Hesperus struggled back to his feet, leaning against the greasy bulkhead. He took a long, laboured breath; then another. He looked up at Rus. “Issoar … Issoar is a moderately busy system. Stable. A thoroughly civilised part of the Co-operative. We could get lucky: maybe we’ll hit the witchpoint there and find a Viper patrol. Broadcast an SOS …”
“We’re still carrying an Offender tag: they might attack us,” said Rus. “In our current state we’re not fit to fend off much more than whistles and sneezes. Besides, if what you’ve told me about this Fractal Sacrifice is true … how many police Vipers would we need to take it down?”
Hesperus chewed at his thumb. “Wouldn’t matter. Just something to occupy it long enough for us to get away. There’s a chance … long odds, I’ll grant you, but there’s still a chance. We just need to find some way to shorten those odds, is all. Cook’s Constant be damned: can you find some way to recharge the shields and cool the laser before we drop out of witchspace?”
Rus flung up his hands. “Yes, let’s throw another form of certain death into the pot, why not?” He clutched his head, and groaned. “I can try. The shields, at least. But I’ll have to turn off the electrolysis rig.”
Hesperus nodded. “Agreed: we can manage without it, for a while, at least. We can take turns on the remaining bottles from the pressure suits. And the laser?”
Rus shook his head. “Can’t be done,” he said. “Don’t look at me like that: this is so basic surely even you can understand. We need to dump the heat, and right now there’s nowhere to dump the heat to. Usually we radiate it out into the vacuum – which is difficult, it being a good insulator, but at least there’s a lot of it. But here, we’re all that exists; there is no outside, not until we reach Issoar.”
“Yes. Yes. Right.” Hesperus reached out a hand. He hesitated, then patted Rus, once, on the shoulder. “Just do
your best. If you need assistance, let me know.”